The chef and his redfish: Randy Rucker at his Third Coast Thanksgiving pop-up.

The chef and his redfish: Randy Rucker at his Third Coast Thanksgiving pop-up.

Photo: Alison Cook

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Chickweed persillade for the redfish at Randy Rucker's Third Coast Thanksgiving pop-up.

Chickweed persillade for the redfish at Randy Rucker's Third Coast Thanksgiving pop-up.

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Dried bonito for making dashi broth, a feature of Randy Rucker's recent Third Coast Thanksgiving pop-up.

Dried bonito for making dashi broth, a feature of Randy Rucker's recent Third Coast Thanksgiving pop-up.

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Randy Rucker explains a dish at his recent Third Coast Thanksgiving pop-up at Paulie's/

Randy Rucker explains a dish at his recent Third Coast Thanksgiving pop-up at Paulie's/

Photo: Alison Cook

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Randy Rucker's new Bramble restaurant targets January opening

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It’s finally happening: after three years wandering in the pop-up wilderness, chef Randy Rucker — one of Houston’s fiercest kitchen talents— will return to the local restaurant stage in early 2015. Rucker and partner Eoghan Dillman have targeted January to open restaurant Bramble at 2231 S. Voss, in the freestanding building that once housed Mancuso’s Italian restaurant.

There, in a 46-seat dining room with an 8-seat bar, onetime James Beard semifinalist Rucker will offer nightly-changing menus of his signature modern Gulf Coastal cuisine, centered on carefully sourced and foraged regional ingredients.

The chef’s interest in foraging intensified when he ran Bootsie’s out in the semi-rural wilds of Tomball from 2010-2011, and he has pursued it avidly in the years since Bootsie’s closed, using wild plants and the wealth of Gulf bycatch he regularly fishes for as ingredients for his special-event and pop-up dinners. Along with proteins, grains and vegetables gleaned from area ranches, farms and artisan producers, these wild elements will be an important part of Bramble’s seasonal repertoire.

Construction and permitting are still underway after a five-month-long process that saw the partners switch architects from high-profile Collaborative Projects to Scott Palermo, who is finishing out the project with engineer Keith Box. Rucker sounds excited about the kitchen garden that will take shape out front and the “extremely open” kitchen with a live-fueled hearth as a focal point. He’s talking about seasoning various woods and even producing the restaurant’s charcoal.

Rucker made a name for himself pioneering modern culinary techniques in Houston, dating back to his groundbreaking downtown restaurant from the mid-Aughts, Laidback Manor. But over the years, as he moved from Laidback to a consultancy with the Cordua group, from his Tenacity Supper Club pop-ups to Rainbow Lodge and then Bootsie’s, Rucker has embraced a more rustic aesthetic and traditional cooking methods that will be on display at Bramble. House-made pickles, fermented products and vinegars will be in play, along with the aging and curing of meats, charcuterie and even fish.

Example: At a recent Thanksgiving pop-up dinner, Rucker offered an old-fashioned cornbread served with cultured butter dusted with an irresistibly bright and briny powder made from sun-dried flounder roe. He also showed off a dried slab of Gulf bonito he’s using to make his own Third Coast dashi broth these days; and he served up a king-sized redfish that he’d caught himself with a vivid green chickweed persillade that tasted dark and deep, with a bitterish herbal twinge that was unforgettable. The dish had that nowhere-but-here, nowhere-but-now quality that has become increasingly important to Rucker in recent years, and that will be a guiding principle at Bramble.

The restaurant will be open for dinner Tuesday through Saturday, and they won’t take reservations except for parties of 6 or more. (A press release specifies that bookings will be by “casual appointment only,” a mystifying turn of phrase.) The press release categorizes Bramble’s food as “New American with heavy influences from the South,” and takes pains to define the restaurant as “an approachable neighborhood joint serving honest food and drinks with walk-in seating.”

Maybe so. But it’s certain to be a different kind of approachable than its future neighbor in this developing Tanglewood/Briargrove restaurant row, Shepard Ross’s The Del. Ross recently told CultureMap he wanted his planned spot to be like “a better Barnaby’s.” Rucker can cook a chicken fried steak with the best of them, but he’s more apt to be coaxing sunflower seeds into a resonant “risotto” mined with wild duck, as he did for his recent Thanksgiving pop-up. So it should be interesting to watch him work out a balance between high-flying and “approachable,” which often is a code for burgers, Caesar salad and crab cakes.

Bramble will have a full bar with a kitchen-driven drinks program, promises Eoghan Dillman, whose resume includes broad wine and cocktail experience from New York to New Orleans, and who currently heads up his own restaurant, bar and nightclub consulting firm, The Auteur Group, with clients in Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New Orleans. He plans a roster of a punch, several cocktails, an aperitif, a digestif and a couple of nonalcoholic drinks, all of which will change daily along with the menu and the season’s ingredients. The chief inspiration, according to Dillman, will be “the fruits, vegetables, minerals and herbs that Texas provides us daily.” The actual spirit selection? “Quite atypical,” he vows.

Dillman is promising small-production wines, changing by-the-glass selections to complement the menu, and a revolving slate of local beers on draught to go with a seasonal selection of bottled beers.

Rucker and Dillman are joined in the Bramble project by investors Tommy Holmes III, Harrison Cullen and Vincent Trejo. Holmes is a lawyer who will act as an operating partner handling administrative issues. One of the group’s initiatives has been to scour their rural properties for salvaged barn wood, farm implements and other materials to use in the restaurant’s build-out.